Note the reference to “grass-roots insurrection”—the Tea Party is doing that now, and there are signs of the same phenomenon in Great Britain.

New York, April 24, 1993

THE issue of immigration into the United States is in what might be called its pre-Powell stage. The sharp influx is causing increasing discontent, just as there was in Britain before Enoch Powell made his famous speech 25 years ago. The political establishment has been sitting on the problem, but is looking increasingly uncomfortable.

As well it might: American politics lacks the British parliamentary system`s institutional barriers against grass-roots insurrection.

The immigration issue has an explosive characteristic: it blasts across all political lines. Last year, for example, my story in the conservative magazine The National Review raised economic and crypto-Powellian questions about the influx. That got me into trouble with luminaries of the conservative movement, such as the editor of The Wall Street Journal, who complained not unreasonably that he had been instrumental in my arrival here.

The American immigration situation is unprecedented in world history. The 1965 Immigration Act, which abolished the previous preference for Europeans, triggered an unexpected immigrant influx, predominantly Hispanic and nearly nine-tenths coloured. Simultaneously, illegal immigration has soared. An estimated nine million people arrived in the 1980s, equalling the previous peak decade of the 1900s. About 15 million are expected this decade.

White American birth rates are much lower than at the turn of the century, so the ethnic balance is shifting quickly. Whites have fallen from almost nine-tenths of the population in 1960 to less than three-quarters in 1990. Demographers calculate that America might cease to be majority white by 2050.

So much American political debate trembles with barely contained hysteria about race and ethnicity. To anyone who knows about the history of nation-states in Europe, it is obviously no more possible to change the ethnic content of a polity without fear of consequence than to replace abruptly all the blood in a human body. Yet this is the experiment upon which America has embarked.

Although US immigration policy is irrational, the political establishment resists discussion of it. The reasons are various. Some will be familiar to British observers; others reflect peculiar American pressures. We may be watching America heaping up its funeral pyre, to use Mr. Powell`s phrase. Or perhaps a launching pad to becoming the “first universal nation”. Whatever it is, it looms increasingly large.